The board for the State University of New York voted unanimously to move forward with closing the hospital. As trustees moved to vote, their voices were drowned out by chants of “postpone the vote” and “shame, shame” from the roughly 50 people in attendance, mostly nurses and hospital workers.

John Williams, president of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which runs LICH, recommended to the board Thursday afternoon that the hospital be closed, saying it has a projected deficit of $41 million this fiscal year. At a public hearing later Thursday afternoon, local politicians, hospital workers and patients testified in favor of saving the 155-year-old hospital, which is the only one in downtown Brooklyn.

Before the vote, SUNY Board Chairman Carl McCall asked Williams to spend the coming months creating a more detailed plan for closing the hospital, including determining how to help employees who will lose their jobs, work with the community to study how to continue providing medical service to the downtown Brooklyn, and create a plan to preserve SUNY Downstate’s two other Brooklyn hospitals in Bay Ridge and Flatbush.

“Overall the issue here is money. We are about to run out of money,” McCall said.

Williams said in an interview Thursday that closing the hospital could take anywhere from a couple of weeks to months. SUNY officials will have to submit a closure plan for approval to the state Health Department, which could make modifications. The state agency rarely, however, reverses a hospital’s decision to close.

Hospital workers and union officials nonetheless insisted after the vote that the hospital’s fate isn’t yet sealed. They said they would spend the coming weeks and months pressuring the department not to approve the closure plan.

“I’m hoping that the Department of Health will see the need … when they see that we provide asthma care, we provide emergency care, we provide cardiac care. We’re a full-service hospital, so to close us down just doesn’t seem sensible,” said Maritza Pabon, a 50-year-old staffing coordinator at the hospital.

Ronnie Babb, an area vice president with the 1199 SEIU, a health-care workers union, dismissed officials’ assurances they would try to find jobs for the roughly 2,000 workers at the hospital, noting a number of health-care centers in the borough are also in distress or danger of closing.

“Where are they going to find them?” he said.

Our fight isn’t over,” said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, in a statement after the vote. The Health Department “has an opportunity to ensure the needs of this community and all of Brooklyn are met — and that’s precisely what we will urge it to do.”